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I apologize in advance for the poor title. I'm really not sure how to phrase my question. I often see in Japanese sentences structures like the following:

エホバに関するどんな事実を強調しましたか。

In the above, エホバに関する (let's call it 'A') seems to stand on it's own as some clause that, to my eye, doesn't seem clearly attached to the remainder of the sentence. Then we have どんな事実を強調しましたか ('B') that makes sense on it's own (e.g. 'B' meaning "What facts were highlighted?")

Is, エホバに関する, modifying どんな in this case?

In many Japanese sentences, I often see a clause ending in plain form that just sits before (or after) the rest of the sentence. But it's not joined to the remainder of the sentence with any particle like の, こと, ため, によって, etc. So it's simply "A + B" with no particle to join them and it doesn't always look like an adjectival clause.

Am I just confused? Is the above just an adjectival clause for どんな or is this a common structure I'm just not aware of?

1 Answer
1

In this case, エホバに関する is a relative clause, so it modifies the following noun phrase. Since どんな is not by itself a noun, we can conclude that it's part of a larger noun phrase. In this case, the only possible such noun phrase is どんな事実.

Note that unlike English, Japanese doesn't have a distinct class of words called determiners which terminate the expansion of a noun phrase. That is, in English you cannot say phrases like *the red this house, because the determiner this cannot be further modified by the string the red. In Japanese, however, you can place modifiers before words like どんな or あの without a problem.